The Tiger’s Child: The story of a gifted, troubled child and the teacher who refused to give up on her

I had a good friend, Sandy McGuire, a third-grade teacher in another school who I felt would be an ideal next teacher for Sheila. She was young, innovative and had a reputation for sensitivity toward her students, many of whom came from minority backgrounds or extreme poverty. And while we had quite different styles of teaching, we shared similar philosophies. I felt confident that if Sheila went with her, she would receive the support and encouragement she would need to make the transition back into the mainstream.

In the beginning, Ed, the director of special education, was not in favor of this, as it would mean not only releasing Sheila back into regular education, but also advancing her a grade, a practice he frowned upon; however, after much discussion we mutually concluded this was the best choice. Academically, Sheila was at least two grades above her chronological peers and she had no current peer friendships to disrupt anyway. Moreover, I feared that if Sheila did not receive a certain amount of academic challenge, she would get herself into trouble just to stay occupied. The most important factor, however, remained the teacher. Sheila had to have a flexible, supportive teacher to cope with the transition from me and my room to a new setting and I held tight to my belief that Sandy best fulfilled this capacity. In the end, Ed and the placement team agreed.

Sheila didn’t.

I approached the whole issue cautiously, although not tentatively, as Sheila would home in on anything done with uncertainty. Moreover, there was nothing to be tentative about. June was coming and that was the end.

Tears, anger and great silences met my early efforts to broach the subject. We spent the better half of a week dancing nervously around the matter, once it had been raised.

“This here be my class,” Sheila muttered to me after school. Her peculiar usage of the word “be” had almost disappeared over the months since she had been in our room, but now it came back. “I ain’t going in no other class. This here be mine.”

“Yes, it is, but the school year will be over in a few weeks’ time. We need to think about next year.”

“I’m gonna be in here next year.”

My heart sank. “No, sweetie.”

“I am too!” she shouted. “I’ll be the baddest kid in the whole world. Then they won’t let you make me go away!”

“Oh, Sheil. Oh, sweetheart, that’s not what’s happening. I’m not kicking you out. I’d love to have you with me.”

She remained angry, her face flushed, her eyes hurt. She pressed her hands over her ears.

“This class isn’t going to be here next year,” I said softly.

She heard me, even through her hands. The color drained from her face. “What d’you mean? Where’s it going?”

“It’s a grown-up decision. The school district decided they don’t need it and everyone can go into other classes.”

Tears filled her eyes. Taking out the chair across the table from me, she slumped into it, folded her arms on the table and lay her head on it. The tears just fell. Her pain was palpable. I’m sure I could have touched it, had I reached out, and when I didn’t, it pressed in against me.

All I could think of at just that moment was how much we expected from her in terms of tolerance, acceptance and understanding, and here she was, only six. Six, for God’s sake, not even seven until July.

What had I gotten her into? There I was with all my ideologies on commitment and how it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But did she think that? Had I ever given her a choice?

On the other hand, what choice was there? To have done what I did, or to have left her as she was and simply counted off the days until they would come for her? There hadn’t been many alternatives. Watching her as she wept, I did not know if even with so few alternatives I had chosen the right one.

Sheila rose from the table and went to bury herself among the pillows in the reading corner. I remained at the table, listening to her as she cried. At last, I rose and went over.

“How come you ain’t staying to make me good?” she asked me, her voice confused.

“Because it isn’t me who makes you good. It’s you. I’m here to let you know that someone cares if you’re good or not. And in that way, I’ll never leave you, because I’ll always care.”

“You’re just like my mama,” she said.

“No, I’m not, Sheil.”

“You’re gonna leave me, just like her.”

“No, Sheila, this is different.”

“She never loved me really,” she said softly, matter-of-factly. “She loved my brother better than me. She left me on the highway like some dog, like I didn’t even belong to her.”

“I’m not her. I don’t know what her reasons were for what she did, but this is different, Sheila. I’m a teacher. My ending comes in June. But I’ll still love you. I won’t be your teacher any longer, but I’ll still be your friend.”

“I don’t wanna be friends. I wanna be in this class.”

I reached over to her. “I know you do, sweetheart. I do too. I wish it could go on forever.”

She pulled away. “You’re bad as my mama.”

“This is different.”

“It don’t feel any different to me.”

They were an emotional few weeks, those last ones. Sheila was in tears as often as not. Not angry tears, though, just tears, popping up at the most unexpected moments: while we were baking cookies on Wednesday afternoon, while giving water to our cantankerous rabbit, while reading on her own in the book corner. I felt they were a natural part of the separation process, so I accepted them, giving her what comfort she sought and otherwise letting her come to terms at her own pace. And tears were by no means her only expression. There were plenty of boisterous, happy moments too.

I took her over to visit Sandy and her classroom and then we arranged for Sheila to go spend a trial day there. As I suspected would happen, Sheila was seduced by Sandy’s warm, cheerful personality and by the more stimulating environment of the third-grade classroom. These children were actively learning, busy with intriguing projects and undertakings, many of them self-generated. All in all, quite a different atmosphere from our classroom, where going to the toilet was considered an achievement. Sheila came back vibrant from her visit, her conversation full of “Next year, when I’m in Miss McGuire’s class …” I knew then I had been outgrown.

Then the last day.

We had a picnic in the park to celebrate our year together. All the parents were invited and we brought packed lunches and ice cream and all the trappings for a good day out. Ours was an extraordinarily beautiful municipal park with a long, winding lane lined with locust trees, a babbling brook that tumbled down through natural rock cascades to empty into a large duck pond ringed with weeping willows. In all directions there were large expanses of grass stretching out beneath ancient sycamores and oaks.

Sheila loved the park. She had never been there before coming to our room, as it was a long way from the migrant camp; but it was only a few blocks from the school, so I had taken my class over on several occasions. Her father did not come that day, but it was obvious he was making more of an effort with Sheila. She came dressed in a bright-orange cotton sunsuit and excitedly told us how her father had taken her down to the discount store the night before and bought it, especially for her to wear to the picnic. She was so ebullient that day, skipping, dancing, pirouetting in the sunshine, that I still call to mind that bobbing form of sunlit orange every time I smell locust blossoms or see duck ponds.

And then, finally, the end—the last good-bye at the door of the classroom to Anton, the last walk together over to the high school to meet her bus. I had given her the now dog-eared copy of The Little Prince to take with her, a tangible reminder of these last five months, and she clutched it to her as we walked.

Running up the bus steps, she went straight to the back and clambered up on the bench seat to wave to me from the back window. The bus rumbled to life and diesel fumes overpowered the scent of locust blossoms. “Bye,” she was saying, although I couldn’t hear her because of the glass and the noise of the engine. The bus began to pull away and she waved frantically.

“Bye-bye,” I said and lifted my hand to wave too, as the bus turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Then I turned to walk back to my classroom.

Chapter 5

When autumn came, I was a thousand miles away from the school, the migrant camp and the locust trees. Settled into graduate school, I was devoting most of my spare time to research. Some years earlier I had become intrigued by psychologically based language problems, elective mutism in particular, where an individual can speak but does not do so for emotional reasons; however, I had had to put this on the back burner while teaching full-time, because there just hadn’t been time to pursue it. Now I was able to devote the kind of attention to the work I wanted. As a consequence, I was still in daily contact with children, but it was of a different kind and quality to what the classroom had given me. This was okay. I had been ready for the change, and thus was finding this new work rewarding.

Chad and I had parted ways over the summer. We’d been together for much of the previous three years and the last year, in particular, we’d grown close. Sheila, in her own way, had brought us closer still. Previously, Chad had only been part of my personal life, a world I tended to keep strictly separate from my life in the classroom, but with Sheila’s hearing in March, he had been drawn into that too. The magic of that night when Chad had taken Sheila and me out for pizza had been powerful and all three of us, I think, got caught up in a dreamy moment of believing we were a family. It’d seemed so right just then—Chad, Sheila and I; however, in the cold, hard light of day, I knew it wasn’t right. Chad was older than I was and had sown his wild oats, but I was still very young. I knew I was not yet ready for the commitments that a closer relationship with Chad would entail. Because commitments were so important to me, I wouldn’t make them lightly. So, seductive as the vision of family life was at that point, I knew I would fail at it if I tried it now. So this, too, lay behind my decision to change tracks and move away from the area. I loved Chad and I didn’t want to break up our relationship, but I didn’t want to intensify it either. Putting distance between us seemed a reasonable solution.

Chad, of course, figured out what I was doing and he wasn’t particularly happy about it. For him the time was right to settle down and get married. If anything, those last eight weeks with Sheila had verified for him that this was what he wanted and he chafed at my uncertainty, angry with me one moment for my immaturity, poignantly vulnerable the next, when he bemoaned the unfairness of the fact that no matter how much a man might be ready to be a father, he couldn’t be one without a woman. I felt awful, as one always does when relationships crumble, but I went ahead with my plans regardless, knowing in my heart even more certainly that this was the right thing to do.

Sheila went into Sandy McGuire’s third-grade class, and for all intents and purposes, she did extremely well. Sandy kept me well informed with letters each month or so. I was gratified to hear that Sheila was settling in, making friends and achieving good academic results, and even more so to hear that she was coming to school cleaner and better fed, which made me hope the home situation was improving.

My only other source of information was Anton, who still lived in the migrant camp himself and occasionally saw Sheila there. Despite my misgivings when Anton had first come to my classroom the previous autumn, he had turned out to be a natural teacher. He had tremendous rapport, particularly with the slower children and with the Spanish-speakers, of whom there were many in our migrant population. As a consequence, he had decided to work on his teacher qualifications at the nearby community college while still continuing as an aide in the school district. He was well informed on how all my former students were doing, and thus, a letter from Anton was a real treat.

I wrote to Sheila, as I had promised her I would do, and Sheila occasionally wrote back. She was, however, only seven, and as with all seven-year-olds, no matter how gifted, letters were clearly a chore. They came erratically and if I had not had Sandy’s letters in the interim, I really wouldn’t have had any idea of what was going on. Indeed, the contents of Sheila’s letters were even more erratic than their number. She was given to sending me her homework for some reason and that was all I sometimes received for months on end.

All went smoothly. Sheila finished her year with Sandy an enthusiastic, if somewhat quirky, student, and was promoted to the fourth grade. I received a school picture of her from Sandy, showing her in a bright-yellow dress, her smile sweet and toothless. She looked well, if not too clean.

Autumn came but Sheila didn’t. I received a puzzled note from Sandy saying that Sheila had been withdrawn from the register. It was Anton who investigated the matter and wrote back to tell me that Sheila and her father had moved to a small city on the far side of the state, some two hundred miles away. They had left in June, just after school had let out, apparently because her father thought he had found a job.

I wrote to the only address I had, her old one, and received no answer. Distressed at the thought that I had actually lost contact with Sheila, I made a few phone calls in an effort to trace her. During the course of these, I discovered that she had apparently gone into foster care at the end of the summer, but it was only a rumor and I couldn’t confirm it. I knew no one in this new city to which she and her father had moved and I was twelve hundred miles away. It proved impossible to find out where she was and how she was doing.

This upset me profoundly. Confiding in an older colleague one afternoon after an abortive effort to trace Sheila, I was reassured that this was better, that I shouldn’t try to hold on to old students. She smiled gently and patted my shoulder. “Never look back. You’ve got to love them and leave them.”

It was three years before I managed to go back to Marysville to visit my old friends. By then Anton was gone. He had completed his two-year course at the community college and won a scholarship to the state university to finish his bachelor’s degree. I visited with Sandy, however, and Whitney, who was now a senior in high school; and I went back to walk through my old classroom, now converted into a resource center.

Chad and I had separated amicably and we’d stayed in touch. He was married now to a fellow lawyer named Lisa and she was expecting their first child in a month’s time.

We decided to lunch together and I came up to his law office to meet him. He had been held up in a meeting, so I paced languidly about the reception desk waiting for him. It was then I noticed a paper lying in the outgoing basket. I just caught it with the corner of my eye, but the name pulled me back. It was Sheila’s father’s name. Glancing at the receptionist, I realized I couldn’t really look, but I was desperate to hear what Chad had to say.

“Didn’t you know he’s back in prison?” Chad replied to my query.

“No. When did this happen? You never told me.”

“Well, I couldn’t really, could I?” he said apologetically. “I mean, confidentiality and all. Besides, I assumed you did know.” What he didn’t mention was that we had never exchanged much more than Christmas cards anyway since we’d parted. But still, I felt somehow cheated.

Chad smiled gently. “I’m not handling many legal aid cases these days, so I didn’t know myself until I saw the folder.”

“What’s happened?”

“I can’t really discuss it, Torey.”

“I’m not just anybody, Chad. I was the one who brought him to you in the first place.” I was feeling hurt and heartsick. I knew it was hardly Chad’s fault and I fully understood his need to keep confidence with clients, but the shock made me irritable.

“Well, suffice it to say he’s been wholly predictable. He’s up for the same tricks as always.”

“Where’s Sheila then?”

“Don’t know. He’s been living over in Broadview for a couple of years now and he was arrested and booked over there. They sent over here just looking for files. I’ve never seen him or anything.”

“But where’s Sheila?” I murmured, lowering my head.

Heartbroken at this discovery, I endeavored to find out about Sheila’s fate, but I had few resources at my fingertips. Broadview was still two hundred miles off and was a much bigger city. Finding one small girl was no easy matter. The most I could confirm was that she had been taken into foster care as a direct result of her father’s arrest and imprisonment and was, apparently, still placed. Where, with whom and for how long I could not determine. Rumor had it that she had been repeatedly in and out of foster care from the time they had moved.

Foster care. Practically the whole time Sheila was in my class, all of us had viewed foster care as a panacea to her problems. If only Sheila were away from the poverty, if only she were in a stable home with loving parents, if only … We hadn’t been able to get her into foster care then simply because the Social Services were so overstretched in Marysville and she did have her natural father. Now she was in foster care and I should have felt glad. The fact was, I didn’t.

Back home, I sat down and wrote a very long letter to Sheila. I told her about my visit to our old school and our old friends. I mentioned that I knew her life had been disrupted in the last eighteen months and that I knew she was now with foster parents. I said that I hoped all was well and that if there was any way I could help, I would be happy to try. Including my phone number, I said she could call me collect any time, if she wanted. Then I added a photograph from the visit of Sandy and me and an old one I had taken of Sheila on our last-day picnic. Folding everything together, I put them in a large envelope. But where would I send it? In the end, I sent it to her father, in care of the prison, and asked him to forward it to her.

I never heard whether Sheila received my letter or not, whether she ever knew that I was trying to find her again. There was no answer, and as the months went by, I began to accept there wasn’t going to be one.

This was difficult for me to come to terms with. It seemed inconceivable to me that she had disappeared from my life. Yet the words of my colleague kept returning to me: you’ve got to love ’em and leave ’em.

Two years later, a small envelope arrived on my desk. It was addressed not to my home, but rather to the university where I now taught. I recognized Sheila’s loose, scrawly handwriting immediately and tore the envelope open. There was only one sheet of paper inside, a crumpled piece of lined notebook paper. The writing was done in blue felt-tip marker with many of the words watermarked, as if the paper had gotten splattered by rain. Or was it tears?

To Torey with much Love

All the rest came

They tried to make me laugh

They played their games with me

Some games for fun and some for keeps

And then they went away

Leaving me in the ruins of games

Not knowing which were for keeps and

Which were for fun and

Leaving me alone with the echoes of

Laughter that was not mine.

Then you came

With your funny way of being

Not quite human

And you made me cry

And you didn’t seem to care if I did

You just said the games are over

And waited

Until all my tears turned into

Joy.

There was nothing else, no letter, not even a note. As with the days when she had sent me only her homework, Sheila seemed to feel no need for explanations. It was my turn to cry then and so I wept.

Part 2

Chapter 6

I can remember the moment precisely when the magic began. I was eight, a not-very-outstanding third grader in Mrs. Webb’s class. I didn’t care much for school. I never had. My world in those days was the broad, swampy creek that ran below our house; that and my beloved pets. School was something that got in the way of my enjoyment of these things.

On one particular morning, my reading group had been sent back to our desks to do our seatwork, while Mrs. Webb listened to the next group read. On my desk, under my workbook, I had hidden a piece of paper, and instead of doing what I should have been doing, I sneaked the opportunity to write. At home I had a dachshund, which had been a present to me from my mother on my seventh birthday, and I made him the hero of a rather lurid tale involving our old mother cat and a band of marauding, eye-plucking crows. So absorbed did I become in spinning this tale that I failed to notice Mrs. Webb on the move, and what inevitably happens to eight-year-old girls who do not do their reading workbooks happened. Mrs. Webb snatched the story away from me and I had to stay in from recess to do my work.

The incident itself was minor, the sort of thing to which I was unfortunately rather prone, and as a consequence, I forgot all about it. Then, a couple of weeks later, I was ill and kept out of school for a few days. When I returned, I had to stay after school that afternoon to make up some of the work I had missed. Mrs. Webb apparently took this opportunity to clean out the drawers of her desk. Anyway, when I had finished, she handed over a piece of paper to me. “Here, I think this is yours,” she said. It was the story about my dog and the crows.

Collecting my coat and belongings to go home, I began to read it as I walked down the school corridor, dark and silent because all the other children had left so long before me. Once at the end of the hall, I pushed open the heavy double doors of the school and then sat down on the concrete steps at the entrance to finish reading.

That precise moment I remember with such exquisite clarity—the feel of the cold concrete through my skirt, the late-autumn sunshine transposed against the darkness of the school entranceway, the uncanny silence of the empty playground, even the faint anxiety of knowing that I should be on my way home because my grandmother would worry if I was too late. The paper, however, held me spellbound.

It was all there: my dog, his adventure, the excitement such melodramatic experiences always created in me. I felt just as excited by the story reading it as I had been writing it. Astonished when I realized this, I lowered the paper. I remember lowering the paper, looking over the top of it, seeing someone’s hopscotch game chalked onto the playground asphalt, and being overwhelmed by a sense of insight. Wow! I had always written because I found writing like pretending: an opportunity to turn myself into someone else for the moment I was doing it and be that individual, feeling his or her feelings and experiencing his or her adventures; but once the act of creation was over, I had never really gone back to what I had written. Now here it was, two weeks later, and I was feeling exactly what I had experienced earlier when I was writing it. Exactly. Again. As if the two weeks hadn’t happened. I had stopped time. There, on the school steps, I knew I had stumbled onto magic of the first order. Real magic!

For the rest of my childhood, through my adolescence and into adulthood, writing compelled me. It was an internal, almost autonomic, activity, like circulation or digestion, that happened simply as a natural part of me. I wrote in all forms: diaries, anecdotes, stories. I wrote to understand other people, to give myself the opportunity to be inside them a while and see what it felt like to see the world from another point of view. I wrote to understand emotions and experiences I had not yet encountered. And I wrote to understand myself.